Today Opera Software has released a new version of the Opera browser – Opera 11.50. Opera 11.50 has some new interesting features in store for the users and a few performance improvements. Let us take a look.

Features

Live Speed Dial

Opera was the first browser to implement speed dial, which was later implemented in other browsers such as Chrome. In Opera 11.50, Opera improves the speed dial by bringing the “live speed dial”.

Live Speed Dials are basically extensions that shows live data on the speed dial. The live speed dial might show the weather, clock, unreal email count, latest tweets etc. It depends on what extensions you have installed.

Password Sync

Password Sync is one huge feature that has been missing in Opera. In Opera 11.50,, they have addressed that. Now Opera sync your bookmarks as well as your passwords across different systems.

Opera 11.50 claims to have a faster JavaScript engine, a faster software graphics engine and improved support for the latest web technologies such as HTML5. What better way to test this than to do a benchmark?

JavaScript Benchmark

For the JavaScript benchmark, we choose the SunSpider benchmark. We compared it with Opera 11.11 (previous stable version), Firefox 5 and Chrome 12.

Here is the result:

As it can be seen from the graph above, Opera 11.50 has much better performance than the previous stable version Opera 11.11. However, Firefox 5 still does better.

HTML5

Opera 11.50 is said to have better support for the latest web standards including HTML5. Let us do how it does in the HTML5 Test.

As you can see very clearly, Opera 11.50 has a much better support for HTML5 compared to Opera 11. It is still behind Chrome but it is closing in fast.

Graphics Engine

Opera 11.50 is also said to have a faster software graphics engine. How faster is it compared to the previous release? Let us find out.

To test the graphics engine, we used Microsoft's Fish Tank. The number of fish is increased until the frames per second drops below 15. Here is the result:

In the graph above, the X- axis denotes the number of fish and the Y-axis denotes the frames per second. From the looks of it Opera 11.50 seems to have a slightly better performance compared to Opera 11.11. It, however, lags behind Firefox 5 and Chrome 12.

Download

By the time of writing this, Opera 11.50 has already been downloaded more than 4.1 million times. If you too want to test it out, click on the link below to download it.